POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



MARCH, 1890. 



NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 



VII. COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY. 



By ANDREW DICKSON WHITE, LL. D., L. H. D., 



EX-PRESIDENT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 



PART II. 



THE first effect of the Protestant Reformation was to popu- 

 larize the older Dead Sea legends, and to make the public 

 mind still more receptive for the newer ones. 



Luther's great pictorial Bible, so powerful in fixing the ideas 

 of the German people, showed by very striking engravings all 

 three of these earlier myths the destruction of the cities by fire 

 from heaven, the transformation of Lot's wife, and the vile origin 

 of the hated Moabites and Ammonites ; and we find the salt 

 statue, especially, in this and other pictorial Bibles, during gener- 

 ation after generation. 



Catholic peoples also held their own in this display of faith. 

 About 1517 Francois Regnault published at Paris a compilation 

 on Palestine enriched with woodcuts ; in this the old Dead Sea 

 legend of the " Serpent Tyrus " reappears embellished, and with 

 it various other new versions of old stories. Five years later 

 Bartholomew de Salignac travels in the Holy Land, vouches for 

 the continued existence of the Lot's wife statue, and gives new 

 life to an old marvel by insisting that the sacred waters of the 

 Jordan are not really poured into the infernal basin of the Dead 

 Sea, but that they are miraculously absorbed by the earth. 



These ideas were not confined to the people at large ; we trace 



them among scholars. 

 vol. xxxvi. 37 



